Aug. 16 (UPI) — Special counsel Jack Smith was able to get his hands on private direct messages and drafts on former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but not without a ferocious fight from the platform now known as X, newly unsealed documents revealed.
The documents showed Smith sought to determine who had access to Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account and from what devices. Smith also wanted to determine what devices logged into the account from October 2020 to January 2021, the IP addresses used, the privacy settings and history, as well as all tweets that were “created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by the account.
In a February hearing, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell blasted Twitter for its heavy-handed efforts to resist the court order, leading Howell to question if X’s new owner Elon Musk was trying to “cozy up” to the former president.
While Twitter fought Smith on several fronts in the special counsel’s request, most of the opposition centered around Smith’s request that the document dump remained secret and kept from Trump.
Prosecutors argued that alerting Trump would give the ex-president plenty of time to destroy evidence and alert others who would also be likely investigation targets.
“There actually are concrete cognizable reasons to think that if the former president had notice of these covert investigative steps, there would be actual harm and concern for the investigation, for the witnesses going forward,” said Gregory Bernstein, a member of Smith’s team had told the court.
Twitter argued that some of the communications may fall under executive privilege beyond basic privacy rights. The two months of back-and-forth led Howell to fine Twitter $350,000 while the social media giant lost out on appeal.
Indeed, Smith was looking for a wide range of Trump-connected data in his search.
